What:  President's Lecture Series: Tiaras, Bikins & High Heels: Beauty Pageants & the Myth of the "Perfect" Citizen - Dr. Patrizia Gentile (Women's Studies Professor, Carleton University)
When:  Thursday, March 31, 2011
Time: 12:00 pm - 1:35 pm
Where: Lakeshore Campus, Blue Room (A 170)
For:  All welcome
Cost: No charge.

Bodies and beauty contests matter. Beauty pageants promote Western values of competitiveness, individuality and conformity. They strive not only to sell goods, but also to spread ideals of community, respectability, character, and symbols of nation. They are culturally significant: they offer universal depictions of beauty by collapsing racial, ethnic, and sexual diversity and, in so doing, actually render the idea of beauty problematic and exclusionary. Beauty pageants and the bodies of ���perfect citizens�۝ they put on display are a unique way to explain gender and bodies as signifiers of morality, sexuality, class, race, and ���womanhood.�۝ They also provide insight into contemporary consumer culture because they highlight how bodies and objects are commodified and consumed. In this talk, Patrizia Gentile will discuss how the beauty-industry complex underscores the intersection between the corporate sector, the media, and the beauty industries.

Contact:
Melanie Chaparian
Chair, President�۪s Lecture Series Committee
416-675-6622 ext 4528 or melanie.chaparian@humber.ca